Captive of Wolves (Bound to the Fae #1) - Eva Chase Page 0,22
you leave the stove on?”
My little brother’s eyes widen. I don’t smell anything of the sort, so he couldn’t have either, but simply saying it sends him hustling out of the room and down the hall. My lips quirk with mild amusement. He can pay me back for the trick with a tussle later.
I shut the study door firmly on the way out. As I head toward the staircase myself, my gaze roves to the bathroom door behind which our “guest” is still washing. My ears prick.
No sounds of water moving against a body reach me. Has she finished already? I’d have thought she would need at least an hour to scrub all the accumulated grime from her skin.
Or is she up to something else entirely?
I stalk down the hall and grip the handle with the ease of centuries’ practice in stealth. The latch and the hinges don’t make the slightest sound as I ease the door open a sliver.
She isn’t in the bath, but she’s by it. Sitting on an overturned wooden box—the one for tossing used towels into—her elbow leaning over the lip of the tub. With her back to me, there’s no chance of her seeing me. What is she doing?
Her hand dips into the tub with a faint sloshing of the water and lifts out the sponge I left for her. She brings it to her calf to rub the pale skin there, her leg canting to the side. The sight of her foot, of the unnatural slant to the bones there, triggers my understanding.
She was too weak and too lame to scramble into the tub on her own, or at least she thought it was too much of a risk to try and possibly slip, bang her head, and drown herself. Apparently she was also too embarrassed to say as much to August when he showed her to the room or to call for help if she realized it later.
Kellan was wrong about that much. This one is hardly demanding pampering.
Without the nightgown or the blanket from last night, her emaciation is even more evident. Beneath the fall of her dark, tangled hair, her shoulder blades jut like a hatchling’s featherless wings. The segments of her spine form a picket fence down the center of her back; the angles of her hips are nearly as sharp as the nub of her chin.
And yet there’s a delicate grace to her movements that I find myself appreciating, as if she were one of those intricately sculpted twig puppets one of the court craftswomen used to construct for the shows that entertained me in my childhood.
No, more alive than that. A gamboling fawn, perhaps.
The thought slips through my head, and I yank myself back from the door, shutting it as silently as I opened it. I shake those images from my head. August will be out there hunting deer on Sylas’s request for our luncheon. We snack on fawns.
The last thing I need is to find myself admiring one.
I stride away before anyone can notice I’ve lingered here. Even after I throw back another gulp of absinthe, my hands curl into fists.
I wish we had found nothing more than a recipe in Aerik’s fortress. Or a rare toadstool. Or a vat of nauseating chemicals.
Anything other than a human girl with grass-bright eyes and a frailness she tries to hide.
7
Talia
The knock comes just as I’m squirming into the blouse left for me on the bathroom floor. I spin around, my feet skidding on the wet tiles. Even with my hand on the edge of the tub for support, I nearly fall.
The blouse’s thin fabric drifts to my thighs. The clothes are a little too big on me, the waist of the jeans threatening to slip over my hips, but I’ve become so skinny I’m not sure what size would fit.
“Yes?” I say, managing to push my voice above its now-standard whisper.
Sylas’s commanding baritone carries through the door. “If you’re finished with your bath, I’d like to speak with you.”
Oh. I look at the floor, blotchy with dirty puddles I didn’t feel right trying to sop up with the fluffy white towel, and run my fingers into my hair, which is damp but still full of knots I couldn’t untangle. Not that the latter should matter. The man-who’s-not-a-man on the other side of that door has seen me much worse off. At least now I’m reasonably clean, with a light floral scent from the soap clinging to my skin.